It was made by merchants and is not easily impressed. It is unlikely that Stamford's head will be turned. In this quiet part of the town, a busy commercial area in the 19th century, you feel most strongly that you have stepped into the real Middlemarch, a feeling which intensifies as you mooch on down the narrow, curving, cobbled lane and find yourself outside the serial's Green Dragon pub, a private house at No 2, King's Mill Lane. 'Will Parliamentary Reform put an end to the harnessing of men and women by a hired overseer to draw carts like beasts of burden?' asks a handbill in the window, signed by William Ladislaw, Editor. The only location still bearing the signs of its film star status is the old warehouse at the junction of Austin Street and King's Mill Lane, used as the offices and works of Middlemarch's radical Pioneer newspaper. The coaching trade was at its peak in the 1830s, and Stamford had 30 stagecoaches and 40 mail coaches passing through every day. The BBC was measly with the stagecoaches, though. Battles broke out between townspeople and police in scenes far more violent than anything Eliot's amiable Arthur Brooke suffered at the hustings. The general election of July 1847 was fought on the issue of the Great Northern Railway and Stamford's place on the line. If the town's shopkeepers had won their great battle to bring the mainline railway through Stamford, the film's location managers would have had to look elsewhere - to Richmond in Yorkshire perhaps, or to genteel Totnes.
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